Content creation for environments such as testing is commonly a collaboration among varied parties. For example, in today's distributed world, content developers and consumers employ different spoken languages and different encoded data formats. While standards for the organization, transmission, and presentation of content ensure interoperability, there is a need to work within these standards to convert the content between its input form and the output form required by the content consumer. Diverse consumers will require diverse conversion capabilities. An example of a standard for education-related content supporting diverse content users is the Accessible Portable Item Protocol (APIP™) standard.
APIP™ is an XML based open standard that provides a way for computer based assessment content to be transferable and accessible. Transferability means items can be easily moved between assessment administration, authoring, and content storage systems created and managed by potentially different organizations. Accessibility means that by pre-specifying student needs, the test content and testing environment can be tailored to meet each student's individual needs. The APIP™ Standard comprises a series of data models with standardized XML representations centered on a version of the Question and Test item Interoperability (QTI) Standard. APIP™ provides a large number of XML meta-data elements (tags) that can be associated with content elements in a QTI item file and which are designed to provide specific accessibility supports. Test items are created under the APIP™ standard. While this provides a foundation, it does not implement conversions.
What is needed is a system and method to convert content from one form to another within the confines of a standard.